Bug#823465: dpkg: Won't run at all on i586 Pentium MMX due to illegal instruction
On Sat, May 07, 2016 at 02:42:37AM +0200, Pierre Ynard wrote:
> That's not the idea I'd like to have about Debian. If I wanted
> a distro where unstable is broken and unusable, I would have installed
> <other distro> long ago.
I'm afraid there's not enough people who care about 586 enough to maintain
it. And the bad decision of i386 to stick to a single arch during its whole
life makes it hard to do so on debian-ports. Compare with ARM: there's arm
armel armhf arm64 arm32(arm64ilp32) -- it frequently refreshes the ABI to
make use of new CPU features, which also makes it easy to keep old compat
without forcing new processors to stay with the lowest common denominator.
> What do I do with my i586 system running unstable of last week? Drop it
> into a tub of water, just like i586 support is getting dropped? That's
> going to cause way more downtime than simply running unstable in
> production.
>
> Please tell me, what do I do with it??
My recommendation would be going to jessie[1], it has whole four years of
support left. Anything you need from unstable can be backported. After
those four years you can reconsider, in the unlikely case your machine
will be still alive.
That's four more years than ia64 guys got. Unlike 586's half the speed of
first-gen RasPi, ia64 machines can be pretty beefy -- new ones even are
still being manufactured.
> My "complaint" against unstable is valid. Typical Debian bugs don't
> (or at least shouldn't) wait for the stable release to get fixed. I
> don't see why you retitled this copy of the bug, since it described the
> situation accurately. i586 users running unstable are getting their
> system broken, with no obvious way to handle it. Maybe I'm the only such
> user and you don't care, then at least have the decency to wontfix me.
What kind of solution would you propose? We can't exactly add preinst
guards to every single package. The only package that's depended on by
(almost) all compiled code is libc6, but because of symbols handling the
dependency is usually libc6 (>= 2.15) or such rather than (>= 2.22-7).
Meow!
[1]. Easiest way to downgrade: put into /etc/apt/preferences a pin for
jessie with priority above 1000, then dist-upgrade.
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